At the start of my review for Captain America: Brave New World, I asked a question that’s become increasingly relevant: “What do we want from Marvel?” What constitutes a “good” Marvel film?

While it’s my review and I stand by it, I’ll readily admit I went easier on that movie than most. Sorry, but I liked getting closure on the plot threads left over from 2009 and I don’t see the harm in an occasional bit of mindless fun from a comic book movie. Even so, a number of critics and correspondents seemed to think that Marvel films should be held to a higher standard. If we’re talking about movies that take hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, I could understand that. If we’re talking about holding a Marvel movie to a higher standard just because of the Marvel branding, that’s horseshit. Treating every single MCU film as a huge cultural milestone is exactly how we got to this point of MCU burnout and that shit has to stop.

There was always going to be a period of transition after Avengers: Endgame and it was unrealistic to expect Marvel Studios to immediately bounce back to the level of quality we had expected. Remember that Endgame only happened back in 2019 — the intervening six years only feel like an eternity because of all the shit that’s happened since. Consider that if everything had played out the way it was first announced back in Summer of 2022, we’d be talking about Avengers: The Kang Dynasty right now. Look it up, that movie was literally supposed to come out May 2nd of 2025 when it was first announced. But then the actor in the namesake role got criminal convictions and Hollywood spent half a year on strike and the moviegoing public rejected the multiverse notion that Marvel bet the farm on — not to mention “Secret Invasion” bombing and The Marvels getting unexpectedly sandbagged — and now here we are.

The point being, it’s difficult to know what we should expect from Marvel Studios when Marvel itself doesn’t seem to be in much of any position to dictate their own course. But amidst all this bullshit and uncertainty, it was my buddy Joseph Sheldahl who submitted what might be the single best answer to the question that I started all this with.

A good marvel movie is a good movie. If it’s not a good movie, it’s not a good Marvel movie. And what do I want from Marvel? Good movies, full stop. I don’t care about “content”, and I’d wish they’d stop trying to produce “content”. I want cinema, I want films. Iron Man was a movie. The Winter Soldier was a movie. The latter of which had a narrative that benefitted from the richness of the extended world around it, but was not hamstrung or brought low by it.

Marvel comics often had superheroes with real world, relatable issues- or problems that were understandable. Sometimes the movies lately are practically an exercise in digital abstract with how little they seem to value that concept. I want directors to be given full creative freedom (with sparing exception- Spike Lee once wanted to make Black Panther and eject all the superhero stuff, and relocate Wakanda to being a neighborhood in NYC, iirc. No thanks.) and I want Kevin Feige to realize he’s merely a facilitator, not a creative genius.

Lastly, I want movies to be made when a good idea exists for them, not ideas being generated to match a slot on a calendar in order to tick a box in a “phase”. Is there a great idea for Blade right now? No? Then let it rest.

As if to prove every single word that Joe typed out those few months ago, we now have Thunderbolts*, a movie that nobody asked for and sounded like a terrible idea on paper, but explored relatable and relevant topics in a way that could only be done with these characters in this setting.

The plot and premise to this one are largely centered around Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a shadowy government figure who’s been lurking in the fringes post-Endgame. Turns out that she’s got a history of working with some monolithic corporation, running highly unethical experiments in the search to try and create new superheroes. I need hardly add that since the Avengers disbanded, there’s a vacancy ready to be filled with a team of heroes more pliably and reliably dedicated to the interests of USA security.

Incidentally, this big evil project is called the “Sentry Program”. If you know your comic book history, you already know what time it is and where the plot’s going from here. But if you don’t know all the comic book backstory and your Disney+ subscription hasn’t been active for a while, the filmmakers are very good at bringing the audience up to speed with only a few lines of dialogue. Between this and Captain America: Brave New World, it feels like the writers and producers have gotten a good handle on that.

Anyway, Valentina is now the director of the CIA. And with greater power comes greater visibility. So now she’s facing impeachment hearings (with Wendell Pierce leading the charge as Congressman Gary) and Valentina needs to destroy all evidence of the aforementioned highly illegal and unethical Sentry Project. And then she needs to tie up loose ends by destroying the very people she sent to destroy the evidence. They are as follows.

• Yelena (Florence Pugh) is our de facto protagonist for the picture. She’s still coping with the death of her adoptive sister Natasha, in addition to her library of other personal and family issues (see also: Black Widow).
• John Walker (Wyatt Russell) is still bitter after his ill-fated and short-lived stint as a replacement Captain America (see also: “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”), even more so after his wife and child left him. So now there’s no reason to keep up the pretense and he’s a full-on mask-off asshole.
• Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) is primarily here because she brings her phase-shifting power set, and otherwise it would only be a bunch of anti-hero mercenaries without much of any skills or powers aside from shooting things. I’m sorry to say she doesn’t leave much of an impression.
• Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) is taken out of play so quickly, she’s pretty much a cameo player.

Then we’ve got Bucky (Sebastian Stan, natch), who’s now halfway through his first term as a U.S. House Rep (as first established in Captain America: Brave New World). There are signs that Bucky went into politics so he could try and make a difference in a way that didn’t involve violent crime and superheroics. It’s not going well. Turns out Bucky isn’t a great fit at working within the rules and diplomacy and bureaucracy of government work. He can’t get Valentina impeached within the system, so he tries to see what he can get done outside the system. I need hardly add that as the character who’s been around the longest, who’s done the most evil shit and has done more than anyone else to atone for it, he’s in a unique place to mentor the other characters.

Red Guardian (David Harbour) isn’t associated with Valentina, but he desperately wants to be. The guy’s a sadsack, longing for the glory days of the Cold War and desperately hoping for his chance to be a relevant superhero again. Good news is, his pathetic desperation is effectively parlayed into a kind of sunny optimism the team badly needs. It’s not always easy to tell if he’s cheering everyone else up because he sincerely believes in the others or because he desperately needs the others to believe in themselves, but in the end, does it really make a difference?

Last but not least, we’ve got Bob (Lewis Pullman), the only known surviving test subject for the Sentry project. I’m so torn about how much I can discuss about this character without going into spoilers. Let’s just say that as someone used and manipulated by Valentina, as a superpowered individual with a checkered past, and as someone whose greatest weakness is his own mental/emotional illness, he perfectly embodies everything about this team.

Our cast here is comprised of the losers and misfits of the MCU. They’re not righteous or likeable enough to be heroes, but they’re not bad or threatening enough to be villains. They’re too powerful to be civilians, but not powerful enough to be “superpowered” per se. They’ve all got blood on their hands, they’ve all got trauma, and they’ve all got tragedies they’re desperately trying to atone for.

In other words, they’re lonely. Nobody really knows what place they have in this post-Avengers universe. And they’ve never had anyone they could trust to help them through their PTSD and depression and whatnot. Hell, so much of this movie is about these characters learning to trust each other with their problems in the process of trusting each other to work together as a strike force.

In one especially important scene, Valentina expresses the belief that righteousness without power is only an opinion. She believes there is no good and evil, only bad and worse. She’s a textbook example of everything I hate about David Ayer’s work, and I took a special sort of glee in watching the film dismantle that ethos. Especially considering how David Ayer directed Suicide Squad and the Thunderbolts are commonly dismissed as Marvel’s watered-down answer to the Suicide Squad, that adds an especially delicious layer to the takedown.

The Thunderbolts* spend the entire third act disproving Valentina, simply by trying their best to do the right thing. These are fatally flawed individuals owning up to their flaws and doing the best they can with what they have, working to protect civilians and save the world just for the sake of it. In spite of everything, that’s what makes them heroes.

Maybe not superheroes, necessarily, but heroes nonetheless.

This is a story that could only be told in this particular setting, with these particular characters, at this particular phase in the MCU. The story and themes demand going to some dark places with these characters, going into detail regarding their inner demons and everything we’re running away from. That all hits so much harder precisely because we and the actors have spent so much time with these particular characters. Though to his credit, Pullman blends in like he was always here, and his performance is especially dynamic.

If this film accomplishes nothing else, the filmmakers found a way to make a group therapy session into the climax of a superhero film. Sure, there are CGI effects involved, with a lot of stunts and fight scenes and whatnot, but all of that spectacle is used in a trippy and poignant and thought-provoking way you don’t often see. I don’t know any other way to describe it without spoilers, but the mad geniuses making this picture found a way to craft a metaphor for group therapy, translating that into the language of superhero cinema, and deliver that as a climax in a way that’s thematically rich without compromising the spectacle or action. That alone is reason enough to see this picture.

With all of that said, it isn’t all brooding and fight scenes. Of course the characters pass a fair bit of time with witty deprecating banter. But easily my favorite comic relief character is Mel, delivered with all the precise comical chops of up-and-comer Geraldine Viswanathan. She’s Valentina’s personal assistant, though she has some misgivings about her boss’ current actions. So the character is not only funny and endearing, but she also has her own doubts and baggage consistent with the themes of the movie and she plays a vital role in the plot by virtue of her own agency and clear motivation. This is an A-1 supporting character, simply beautiful.

Thunderbolts* is a textbook example of what we should all demand from Marvel cinema, maybe even from blockbuster cinema as a whole. It’s a movie exactly as big as it needs to be for the purpose of telling a story, more interested in unique visuals and set pieces rather than shoving gratuitous pixels on the screen. The story, setting, and characters all work together to explore coherent and relevant themes in deep and thoughtful ways without skimping on the comic relief or the action we all came here for. This feels like a payoff to so much of what came before in the MCU canon, but it can be enjoyed without rigorous homework and the filmmakers don’t forget to set up future developments in the closing minutes and the post-credits stinger.

Finally, Marvel Studios takes a massive risk and it pays off. Took long enough. Definitely check this one out.